See Also: AGE; LIFE, DEFINED; MANKIND

1. (It seemed to him that) all man’s life was like a tiny spurt of flame —Thomas Wolfe
2. The art of living rightly is like all arts; it must be learned and practiced with incessant care —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
3. The eventful life has dates; it swells and pauses like a plot —Paul Theroux
4. How ridiculous it [life] all seems … like a drop of water seen through a microscope, a single drop teeming with infusoria, or a speck of cheese full of mites invisible to the naked eye —Arthur Schopenhauer
5. In life as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard —Theodore Roosevelt
6. Let us play the game of life as sportsmen, pocketing our winnings with a smile, leaving our losings with a shrug —Jerome K. Jerome
7. Life … empty as statistics are —Babette Deutsch
8. Life … flat and stale, like an old glass of beer —Andre Dubus
9. Life folds like a fan with a click —Herbert Read
10. Life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse —Edna St. Vincent Millay
11. Life had been like a cloud rainbowed by the sun —Barbara Reid
12. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience, like an air artificially made by a discreet musician —Robert Louis Stevenson

    See Also: ART AND LITERATURE

13. A life indifferent as a star —Randall Jarrell
14. A life is composed of a thousand frail strands, like the rainbow tangle of telphone cables. Somehow, we make connections —Jean Thompson
15. Life is shapeless as a glove —Kenneth Koch

    See Also: SHAPE

16. Life … it slips through my hands like a fish —James Reiss

    See Also: ELUSIVENESS

17. Life, like a child, laughs shaking its rattle of death as it runs —Rabindranath Tagore

    See Also: DEATH

18. Life, like a good story, pursues its way from beginning to end in a firm and unbroken line —W. Somerset Maugham
19. Life, like every other blessing, derives its value from its use alone —Samuel Johnson
20. Life, like war, is a series of mistakes —F.W. Robertson
21. Life often seems like a long shipwreck, of which the debris are friendship, glory and love —Madame de Staël
22. Life’s bare as a bone —Virginia Woolf
23. Life is so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss —Virginia Woolf
24. Life should be embraced like a lover —Rose Tremain
25. Life’s like an inn where travelers stay, some only breakfast and away; others to dinnerstop, and are full fed; the oldest only sup and go to bed —English epitath

    A variation of this, also found on a gravestone, is “Our life is nothing but a winter’s day.”

26. Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom —Arthur Schopenhauer
27. A life that moved in spirals turned inward like the shell of a sea-snail —Malcolm Cowley
28. Life was like [motion] pictures only in that it hardly every managed to be as exciting as its preview —Larry McMurtry
29. Like a morning dream, life becomes more and more bright, the longer we live —Jean Paul Richter
30. Like following life through creatures you dissect, you lose it in the moment you detect —Alexander Pope
31. To live is like love, all reason is against it, and all healthy instincts for it —Samuel Butler
32. Man’s journey through life is like that of a bee through blossoms —Yugoslav proverb
33. A man’s life, like a piece of tapestry, is made up of many strands which interwoven make a pattern; to separate a single one and look at it alone, not only destroys the whole, but gives the strand itself a false value —Judge Learned Hand

    Judge Hand compared life to a piece of tapestry at the 1912 proceedings in memory of Mr. Justice Brandeis.

34. Men deal with life as children with their play, who first misuse, then cast their toys away —William Cowper
35. Moved … through her life, like a clumsy visitor in a museum —Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
36. Much that goes on behind Life’s doors is not fixed like the pillars of a building nor preconceived like the structure of a symphony, nor calculable like the orbit of a star —Vicki Baum
37. My life felt like a fragile silk chemise —Marge Piercy
38. My life is like a stroll upon the beach, as near the ocean’s edge as I can go —Henry David Thoreau
39. My life is like the autumn leaf that trembles in the moon’s pale ray —Richard Henry Wilde

    This begins the second stanza of the poem, My Life.

40. My life is like the summer rose that opens to the morning sky, but before the shade of evening closes is scattered on the ground to die —Richard Henry Wilde

    Another simile from Wilde’s My Life, this one the opening line.

41. My life loose as a frog’s —Maxine Kumin
42. Our days on earth are as a shadow —The Holy Bible/Job
43. (I worry that) our lives are like soap operas. We can go for months and not tune in to them, then six months later we look in and the same stuff is still going on —Jane Wagner
44. Our lives are united like fruit in a bowl —W. H. Auden
45. Our lives run like fingers over sandpaper —Jaroslav Seifert
46. Perhaps like an ancient statue that has no arms our life, without deeds and heroes, has greater charms —Yehuda Amichai
47. Sometimes we do not become adults until we suffer a good whacking loss, and our lives in a sense catch up with us and wash over us like a wave and everything goes —Richard Ford
48. The art of life is more like the wrestler’s art than the dancer’s that it should stand ready and firm to meet onsets which are sudden and unexpected —Marcus Aurelius
49. There was a dimension missing from his life, as though trees were flat and rooflines painted on the sky —Margaret Sutherland
50. The vanity of human life is like a rivulet, constantly passing away, and yet constantly coming on —Alexander Pope
51. Viewed from the summit of reason, all life looks like a malignant disease and the world like a madhouse —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
52. Wear life like an old pair of shoes that’s easy on my feet —Ben Ames Williams
53. When the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked … becomes as flat, as superficial as one of those American flirtations in which it is from the first understood that nothing is to happen, contrasted with a Continental love-affair in which both partners must constantly bear in mind the serious consequences —Sigmund Freud
54. Would that life were like the shadow cast by a wall or a tree, but it is like the shadow of a bird in flight —Palestinian Talmud